Python Automation Cookbook, Part 1: The 25 scripts I reach for every week

Every project I start has the same 20 minutes of setup. Write the HTTP client with retry logic. Set up the file watcher. Write the CSV parser. Build the rate limiter. Wire up the scheduler. I know exactly how to do all of it — I've done it fifty times. But I still write it from scratch every time, because I never had a clean canonical version I trusted enough to copy. This year I stopped doing that. I went back through my last 2 years of projects and pulled out every script that (a) I'd rebuilt more than twice and (b) had survived production without modifications. I got 25 scripts. I cleaned them up, documented them properly, and packaged them. Here's what's in there and why I made the choices I made. What "production-ready" means in practice Tutorial scripts have three failure modes: No error handling — they work until they don't, with no useful error output Hardcoded config — you have to edit the file to change any parameter No CLI — you can only run them from another Python script,